Sparks?

Hello there... the angel from my... rainforest?

My enjoyment of research has been partially reignited, probably only temporarily considering my mindset this past 9 months, but it is certainly nice to feel the sparks again 💚.

Despite having minimal sleep, having my physio appointment at 9 am, and then driving out to uni for an hour, today has been quite good. Although, I enjoy my physio appointment, having to race between appointments and things is annoying. 

Someone I am collaborating with came to do a guest lecture today, and I guess seeing and hearing about their passion for rainforests and science is a good thing for me. I went to group lunch afterward, then had a quick meeting with my supervisor and them, and yet to come is dinner with them and a group of mostly professors and one other PhD student. This is A LOT of socialising for me, someone who has not wanted to do any socialising at all for more than a week. I wonder how exhausted I will be tomorrow? 

Anyway, that's it really, just wanted to share that I like trees 🌳. I'll be heading out to the field in a couple of days so I'm going to try and do some desk work now. 

Questioning my path

So I recently just took myself on a solo trip interstate. I very much enjoyed it. This was the first time visiting this city, and the first time travelling somewhere alone and not meeting up with anyone at the other end. I really need to do this more often. I'm not responsible for anyone but myself, I can do what I want for however long I want to. Which for me meant visiting lots of museums and galleries, and spending several hours in the Botanic Gardens! 

It was also great to not have as many loud and intrusive thoughts for a few days. I'm sure they'll pop back up again, but I'm really hoping that they will be a bit quieter, if only for the rest of this month.

Anyway, I've been back for a couple of days now. I had a day of rest yesterday, and a day working from home today because I was too tired to drive anywhere, especially an hour to uni. 

However, now I'm starting to question if I'm even up to a career in academia. I've barely scraped through the past 1.5 years with all of my physical and mental health issues. I haven't even started writing papers or my thesis yet (I don't count methods). 

Perhaps like previous times in my life, after a while of not doing research I will miss it again. Don't get me wrong I really enjoy what I do, it's just the constraints upon me and the battles I fight every single day just to get out of bed or to take a shower are exhausting. I don't know if I can keep doing this long term, something in my life has to change simply so I can function more efficiently. 

What would I do instead? Do more animal work for a while, but I know from experiance that won't be enough to intellectually stimulate me forever. It also won't be able to get me out of the financial situation my family is in. I could also do more casual work at universities, but there's not too much job security in that, there is also a preference to hire internally. I could also go back to making content, but that never really made me much money, and I hate the technological side. 

I have no urge to quit my PhD, I 100% want to finish this. However, I am doubting if I can continue in this line of work afterwards with how I am now. Will I ever be able to swim? :P

Exhaustion

I'm so sleepy lately. I've made it into the university campus this week for three days, which is in some ways amazing considering how sleepy I am.

Monday - I had to pull over on the way in because I was my eyes were getting very heavy on the road. 

Tuesday - I was driving to my gym from uni at the end of the day and had a micro sleep on the road, luckily my tire scraping along the gutter was enough to wake me up.

Wednesday (Today) - I tried to get public transport into uni because I'm so tired, and because I have a meeting in the city tonight. I drove down to my local train station, the commuter car park was full, I drove around all the surrounding streets for about 10 minutes, no parking there either. I ended up having to drive all the way into uni again otherwise I wouldn't get here in time to make it to a meeting I want to go to in person. 

The thing is I'm not sleeping any more or less than I have been for ages, I am just overall exhausted. The past few nights I've been getting 7-8 hours of sleep each night, and not even waking up during the early hours for a change. I'm physically breaking again., which leads to increased symptoms of depression and anxiety of course.

The past few days haven't been too bad. Saturday night I had a mini-date with my partner and that went really well. It made me feel really good. The next day I did a wildlife party, and it was great to be with the animals again. I wasn't sleepy on this day, even with all of the driving, it was a good day. 

Anyway, back to today. All the emotional turmoil that has been plaguing me since July last year is resurfacing again. Just when I thought I was getting through it (yet again) it is back. These emotions physically make my chest/heart feel heavy. I should probably get back to journaling more regularly. When I'm having good days I generally don't feel like journaling, I always seem to leave it for when I feel crappy. Maybe that's not the best method.

As for my PhD, I still don't really know what I'm doing, not having met with my supervisor in several weeks probably doesn't help, but parts of me really doesnt want to either. Still working through my image analysis and planning for a field trip next month.  I am really looking forward to having time off. If it ever gets approved...

First Group DBT - I expressed myself

Today was the first group Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT). 

Arrived about 10 - 15 min late, but that's okay. I made it. I'm still really tired and by the morning tea break around 11:20 I had to go and get another caffeine hit. 

Overall, I Think it went pretty good though. There was only about six of us, with two facilitators. 

We did the 'two truths and one lie' icebreaker. Here's mine:

1. I've been bitten by a crocodile

2. I've been bitten by a shark

3. I've been stung by a sting ray

Do any of you readers know the lie?

______________________________________________________

During this first group session I was already triggered by something. Now I don't usually get offended much, but when I do I usually ruminate and let it fester inside. After debating with myself for a little while whilst everyone was talking about WISE mind, I decided to speak up. It was quite challenging, and part of me still thinks its a stupid thing to get worked up about, but I knew expressing myself would make me feel better, so I did. 

Expressing myself more is one of my therapy goals, and being in a "safe space" I decided to give it ago. As I predicted it made me feel better afterwards. It was really hard when I was saying it out loud to the group though, I could tell I was having a hard time even getting the words out. In the beginning of the session we talked about being respectful and such but also using "I" statements. So that's what I did, I used the term "I". For example, I feel upset by this statement. Rather than saying I don't like what this person said.

I'm still having some negative thoughts about myself though. Things like"you shouldn't get so worked up about something so trivial" and then making fun of myself in a cruel way for feeling that way. I know I should feel proud for speaking up and expressing myself, in a way I do, but it's very hard after so long of not doing so. Maybe I should do another WISE mind ;)

Right now I'm in the library (It's much nicer there than my campus' library, more windows, feels nice and open and light). I've loaded up my image analysis software, but again it doesn't seem to be working properly, which is quite frustrating. Perhaps I should let it update when it asks next time, or even it just won't work without being connected by an Ethernet cable. At least I tried? 

Unplanned time off

After a great weekend out herping (searching for amphibians and reptiles) I was absolutely exhausted on Monday. I did not end up driving into campus as it would probably not be the safest for me to be driving for an hour or so. I did some image analysis at home, but the access to the remote system wasn't working very well so I couldn't do much from home. I also kept falling asleep at the computer.

Accepting that I need a day of rest after a weekend with humans, driving for several hours by myself, and just doing any activity is still not easy for me. I want to be able to do more still. A weekend doing something for myself (in this case a herping trip with a society) was great for my mental health, but I am still left completely physically broken afterwards. It is so frustrating. I wish doing things for myself actually recharged my batteries rather than also ran them down. But I guess I'm not in the best place as of late and even these things drain me more than I would like. 

My mental health must really be in a state when even the things that make me mentally feel better are wearing me this thin. My physical health is certainly not blameless though. This increased migraine severity in my mid thirties is certainly a real douze. 

Oh but don't worry my dear readers, the struggles of my life do not end there. My mother tested positive for covid last night, and as someone of high risk we were advised to go to the emergency department at hospital. So we ended up at hospital around 1 am. We saw the nurse and the doctor, all looked good so far, but bloods were taken just to check, that would be an hour before we got the results for that. Almost 2 hours later I asked what was happening, and whilst the bloods were normal, they could not dispense the anti-viral medication until 7-7.30 am. We were finally able to leave the hospital around 8 am. Now as messed up as my sleep and body already were this was the final straw. Around 3.30 am at the hospital I emailed my supervisor requesting sick leave. Even if Mum's covid is manageable and I don't contract it from her, there was no way I could see myself being able to work this week.

Anyway we got home had something to eat and I went to bed somewhere between 9 and 10 am. I may have been in bed for about 10 hours but I only got about 7 - 8 hours sleep, I woke up several times and I also had a massive headache (the chairs at hospital probably aided with this). I eventually give up on sleeping and trying to rest in bed and get up, the massive headache continues. I take something for it but only generic painkillers not migraine meds. It's decreased the pain a little bit but I can feel it's all still there, its just been pushed back a little bit for now. 

It's 11 pm now. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm sick of being in bed and asleep, I want to do stuff, anything, but I also need to have some sort of diurnal schedule as I start my group DBT on Thursday and assuming I don't get covid, I need to get to that in person, it starts at 10 am.

So there we have it, between my own mental and physical health problems with the addition of my a family members health and my carer responsibilities, I have decided to take another week off. Although doing an official request is still confusing to me since my candidature time is still being eaten up when I'm on sick leave - I guess it's for record keeping purposes. 

I can't really concentrate on writing anymore.

Here's a little reminder..

Absence of negative emotions ≠ happiness

The absence of negative feelings does not equal happiness.

That statement is something I need to remember. It's completely logical, but often forgotten. remember, when you are bored or indifferent you are neither experiencing a negative nor positive emotion. 

I've been listening to The Psychology of Depression and Anxiety - Dr Scott Eilers. That's where this reminder came from, but also some other things I picked up on whilst listening to an episode on happiness. 

He talks about how our life experience is all internal, and everything outside is just stimuli. I absolutely love this. He further goes into how it's all about how we translate or interpret said stimuli that give us our life experience. An example he uses is if you're in another country and everyone speaks a language you don't understand. That stimulus means nothing to you unless you can translate it. Sometimes when we have health problems (mental or physical) our translator doesn't work - it just doesn't get the message through to us or it distorts the message so we are not receiving what the message is in reality. 

Anyway, I started listening to this episode for a second time to reinforce some of this stuff. I've listened to quite a bit of his stuff these past few months, and I highly recommend it. It compliments any other therapy you might be receiving too. He also posts it as YouTube videos if you prefer a visual (see below).

Mid-(PhD)-Life Crisis

I've worked it all out, I'm going through a mid-PhD-life crisis! 

It all makes sense, my thoughts, emotions, and sense of identity have all gone haywire. I'm spending money and going on trips more than usual - I bought a coffee machine, and I've booked flights to go to Adelaide and to Brisbane in the next few months. I'm questioning so many things in my personal life. However, what's interesting is that I'm not questioning doing my PhD. For a mid-PhD-life crisis, doing the PhD is the only thing I'm certain of! 

When you think about what I'm currently doing in my PhD though, it's stuff that I'm either good at (fieldwork), or just monotonous tasks (ie, image analysis). When I'm up to the statistics and writing parts then I will be going completely crazy with super anxiety. Perhaps right now I am redirecting my PhD anxiety and channeling it all into a personal life crisis. Procrastinating with personal life problems?

Just a short post, for now, have some memes...

Ps. I also purchased a silver sequin top online last night... and I'm thinking of going blonde again....